How to Strengthen Your Child’s Emotional Intelligence

When emotions run high, people do and say things they normally would not. When you’re a young child, this is what you do all the time.

Emotional self-regulation, a large component of emotional intelligence, is the ability to manage one’s experience and expression of emotions. With practice, children improve their capacity for emotional self-regulation. By age four, most children start to use strategies to eliminate disturbing external stimuli. In other words, they cover their eyes when they’re scared and plug their ears when they hear a loud noise.

It’s not until age 10 that children consistently use more complex strategies for emotional self-regulation. These strategies can be broken down into two simplistic categories: those that attempt to solve the problem and those that attempt to tolerate the emotion.

When a child can make a change to address a problem, they engage in problem-focused coping by identifying the trouble and making a plan for dealing with it. When they deem the problem unsolvable, they engage in emotion-focused coping by working to tolerate and control distress.

Emotional intelligence

All of these strategies are a part of emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence encompasses awareness, understanding, and the ability to express and manage one’s emotions.

Self-control, one piece of emotional intelligence, is particularly important in predicting achievement in children. Children who are able to inhibit impulses (often driven by emotions) and avoid distractions are able to engage in more prosocial behaviors and accomplish their goals.

A particularly powerful study tested school-aged children on self-control and conducted follow-up studies on those children in their 30s. The study demonstrated that self-control predicted success better than IQ, socioeconomic status, and family environment. Those children high in self-control were also healthier, made more money, and were less likely to have criminal records or trouble with alcohol.

Feelings serve a purpose

The first piece of emotional intelligence is awareness and understanding of emotions. We have to understand and accept before we can control and express our emotions. Emotions are not an inconvenience, but rather a piece of human evolution that serves a purpose. The discrete theory of emotions suggests that each of our primary emotions have evolved to serve distinct purposes and motivate our behavior.

Sadness is an emotion uniquely capable of slowing us down, both in thought and motor activity. This can allow us the opportunity to reflect on the source of our emotional upset and take a closer look at the antecedents of it.

In contrast, anger speeds us up, mobilizing intense energy and sending blood to our extremities. While evolutionary, this geared us up for a fight; in modern times, it allows the sustained energy for a fight of a different nature. Anger cues us that our rights have been violated and helps us mobilize to protect against future threats.

Our emotions are to be respected and reflected upon. This includes our children’s intense emotions at seemingly non-intense situations. My daughter experiences intense anger when she is not able to do something she had previously accomplished, such as buckling her car seat independently.

In their recent policy statement, the American Academy of Pediatrics advised parents not use technology as a way to calm or pacify negative emotions in their child. Specifically they expressed “concern that using media as strategy to calm could lead to problems with limit setting or the inability of children to develop their own emotion regulation.”

Basically, children need the experience of feeling these emotions and practice tolerating them to develop self-control and emotional intelligence.

Increasing your child’s emotional intelligence

Because emotional intelligence appears to be such a strong predictor of success, researchers have looked at how caregivers can encourage its development. Specifically, John Gottman observed how parents respond to their children’s emotions in an effort to understand how emotional intelligence develops. He found that parents respond to children’s emotions one of four possible ways:

Dismissing parents see children’s emotions as unimportant and attempt to eliminate them quickly, often through the use of distraction.

Disapproving parents see negative emotions as something to be squashed, usually through punishment.

Laissez-faire parents accept all emotions from child, but fail to help the child solve problems or put limits on appropriate behaviors.

Emotion coaching parents value negative emotions, are not impatient with a child’s expression of them, and use emotional experience as an opportunity for bonding by offering guidance through labeling emotions and problem-solving the issue at hand.

Gottman’s research shows children of parents who emotion coach are physically healthier, do better in school, and get along better with friends. Emotion coaching parents followed five basic steps to help their children with emotions. Sometimes this can take a great deal of time. Gottman found that emotion coaching parents only followed all five steps 20-25 percent of the time, suggesting there is no need for guilt as no parent can complete this process all the time. The five steps are:

Step 1: Be aware of your child’s emotions.

Parents who emotion coach are aware of their own feelings and sensitive to the emotions present in their children. They do not require their child to amp up their emotional expression for the feelings to be acknowledged.

Step 2: See emotions as an opportunity for connection and teaching.

Children’s emotions are not an inconvenience or a challenge. They are an opportunity to connect with your child and coach them through a challenging feeling.

Step 3: Listen and validate the feelings.

Give your child your full attention while you listen to their emotional expression. Reflect back what you hear, thus telling your child you understand what they’re seeing and experiencing.

Step 4: Label their emotions.

After you have fully listened, help your child develop an awareness of and vocabulary for their emotional expression.

Step 5: Help your child problem-solve with limits.

All emotions are acceptable but all behaviors are not. Help your child cope with his or her emotions by developing problem-solving skills. Limit the expression to appropriate behaviors. This involves helping your child set goals and generating solutions to reach those goals.

Sometimes the steps of emotion coaching may go relatively quickly. Other times, these steps may take a great deal of time. Patience will be key. If the problem is big, all five steps don’t have to be completed in one interaction.

Nurture yourself the way you would your child

In this time when emotions are running high, nurture yourself the way you would your child. Allow yourself to first feel the feelings, as all feelings serve a purpose. If you’re feeling sadness, you may need some time for reflection. If you’re feeling anger, you may want to involve yourself in ways to protect your rights and interests in the future.

Walking through the steps of emotion coaching for yourself, when you’re ready to do so, is a first step in allowing yourself to be an emotionally intelligent being who is successfully meets your goals. After you have an understanding of your own feelings and goals, you can begin the process of emotion-coaching for your child.

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Dr. Meghan Owenz is a psychologist, writer and a university psychology instructor. She has her Doctorate in Counseling Psychology from the University of Miami and Master’s in Clinical Psychology from Pepperdine University. She is happily raising her two kids sans screens. She runs the website, Screen-Free Parenting, where she writes about tech-wise parenting and provides tons of screen-free activities. She has developed a psychologically-based system to help organize the activities young children learn and grow from: the S.P.O.I.L. system. Before you turn on the screen, she asks, “Have you S.P.O.I.L.-ed your child today?
You can follow Screen-Free Parenting via her website, newsletter, or on Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter.

Thank you. Wonderful. And turned up around the same time as the following:
– an article on PTSD and a piece of research involving veterans that showed they were more likely to suffer the condition if they were unable to process their emotions in real time (would be interesting to do research into how many of them weren’t given emotional training as children)
– an article on pain explaining that it really is mostly in our heads and that people with chronic pain have a smaller amygdala and hippocampus (the latter is associated with emotion and it would be interesting to see research into the impact that emotional training as children has on brain development_
– a TEDx video by a hypnotherapist specialising in trauma, including PTSD and associated fibromyalgia, who is achieving impressive results using hypnotic regression to allow patients to go back and appropriately process childhood emotions.

As someone with a history of PTSD and fibromyalgia I find this subject fascinating. My childhood also sounded like this:

-“Stop your whinging or I’ll give you something to cry about”
-“You and your sister can stay in your room until you stop fighting” (with no assistance in how we might do that)
and a pattern of using distraction when I was upset or in pain and being called a bitch if I was angry.
(I am largely recovered and recognise my parents did their incompetent best :D)

I almost made the same mistakes with my daughter. She was crying when she was three and I tried to joke with her. “Mummy, I know you’re trying to help but sometimes I just need to cry to get the sadness out!” After that I honoured her emotional responses and used them to talk about how she was feeling and what she wanted to do about it.

Rachael Israel

I love this article, and I’m wondering if you have any concrete examples to go along with the 5 steps. I have 3 year old twin boys, and this is such an important topic for us right now!

Sanya Pelini

Hi Rachael,

I’ve found that helping kids identify their emotions and teaching them to express them appropriately goes a long way in helping them deal with powerful emotions and learn about self-regulation.

Professor Adele Diamond and McClelland who have worked on emotional regulation have the following suggestions:

1) Teach your boys to express themselves out loud (name emotions). Angry outbursts can be a signal of underlying issues such as fear of being left alone, helplessness, fatigue, quest for autonomy, etc. but children don’t always know how to differentiate between different emotions.

Helping your boys understand their emotions and other’s emotions helps them react better and also helps you propose appropriate ways in which they can react to these emotions. There are many books and flashcards that focus on feelings and 3 years seems like a perfect age to start exploring different emotions with your sons.

2) Learn to identify the triggers and respond appropriately. Identifying triggers helps keep things under control. One activity you can try with your boys is to help them pair emotions with acceptable responses. For example, when I feel myself getting angry, I change rooms or take my anger stone or colour a mandala, etc.

There are many other ways you can practise self-regulation with 3 year olds such as encouraging make-believe play, using storytelling to develop your child’s working memory or teaching them to stay focused using “day-night tasks”.

Sadly you can’t always do something when your child is upset, but the least you can do is empathize. That’s right. Letting your child know that you understand his or her problems can help your angel let go of troubling emotions.

Another important thing to remember is that kids store all emotions in their heads, and like us they might have problems moving on. Understanding doesn’t mean you agree with everything your child says but you can acknowledge their perspective. “I understand it’s hard for you to stop playing, but we need to have dinner now. Yes, it’s dinner time, you can play more tomorrow!”

When kids see that they’re being understood, they won’t have problems handling the more difficult human emotions. Remember, your calmness is what teaches your little angel how to soothe their stormy emotions.